Witnesses and Plates

I agree it can be a bit confusing, perhaps because of the language used. The testimonies of the three and eight witnesses do say they each saw the plates, and as far as we know they each stood by those testimonies even when excommunicated (and I believe they were all eventually excommunicated). In the case of the three it may have been a “spiritual” viewing (vision?), but Oliver does state he saw and handled them. Harris and David Whitmer did not say they handled them. In the case of the eight it is apparent Joseph showed them the plates and they each handled them. We really only have what is written in the witness accounts to go by. Bushman summarizes the experiences in Rough Stone Rolling but doesn’t offer more than what we otherwise know. I do sometimes wonder how Oliver, who did most of the scribing, and Emma, who lived in all the houses where translation took place, did not ever see them during the process. Were I Emma and they were covered and on the table that I was going to set for dinner, I would have done more than moved them aside – I would have peeked. Of course further light and knowledge shed by the essays and the upcoming Ensign article help us to understand that the plates were not necessarily physically present during translation, which could explain why Oliver, Emma, and other translation assistants didn’t see them.

I have to experience those spiritual experiences myself to consider them real. I am sorry, but I’ve been duped too many times by people sharing information that is unverifiable in the moment. The classic example — when I was buying shoes at a shoe store, one of the sales people saw I needed a bit of a push to buy the shoes. He also knew that once I took them home, and wore them outside the store, there were no returns allowed.

He said “they may seem a bit tight right now, but after you start wearing them regularly they will stretch and they will feel like an extension of your own feet”. And if his claim proved false at some point, he was not at risk of losing anything….

He was trying to get me to believe now for a promise that was unverifiable in the future — in a sense asking me to buy on faith.

I look at so much of the LDS stories as falling into the same category…the plates — are gone, the stone, no longer works to create visions, but you can see it (how is it any different than just about any other attractive stone?). Emma never saw the plates, but she saw the box in which they were stored. Joseph had a vision but no one else saw it. Witnesses saw the plates, but it’s not clear if they saw them “spiritually” or for real.

I no longer have much faith in faith as a precursor to knowledge about things that do not manifest themselves in the real world. i believe it’s important when it comes to motivating a person to action, and that learning often comes from action — just as experience begets knowledge. This is very true when you embark on a business venture, or any kind of project — but I have no evidence that exercising faith leads to spiritual knowledge that I feel I can trust…

I speculate that all of it was seen with spiritual eyes aka a visionary experience.

I find that there are several points that support my conclusion. I also find support in other things that were claimed to have been seen that just could not have existed without supernatural means. I speak of the cave in the hill Cumorah that was claimed to be full of records and the final resting place of the Sword of Laban. Geologists have said that the hill Cumorah is not the sort that could support a cave. Underground radar has been used in attempt to find any cave and came up empty handed. Some have speculated that JS and OC were magically transported to hills with caves in Mexico. I find it much more plausible that the experience with the cave was a visionary experience.

I personally deal with it by believing that the BoM and other new scriptures reveal spiritual truths even though I doubt that they are literal translations of ancient records.

The biggest flaw in my theory is Emma’s claim to have felt the shape and heft of the plates under a cloth while cleaning. I rationalize this by thinking that Emma was trying to protect her husband’s legacy and pass it on to her son. At this time JS the third was leader of the RLDS church. This is the same interview (“Last Testimony of Sister Emma” available in PDF at MormonThink) in which Emma denied that her husband ever practiced polygamy and said that he could not put together a “well worded letter.” I therefore discount her testimony on the subject of the plates and hope that I am not unfair in doing so.

It is interesting that Emma describes translating for JS with the stone in the hat method and that there was no curtain between them. She later seems to say that the plates were present on a table in the room but were wrapped in a cloth and that JS did not look directly at them in making his translation.

I find this interesting because I had thought that Emma only translated for JS in the beginning later to be replaced by OC. If Joseph was using his seer stone to translate at this early date then where exactly do the Nephite interpreters figure in?

I also considered this topic for a time, wondering the place of physical objects and their relationship to spiritual things. I have concluded that for me it is just not important to build bridges between the physical and spiritual. I am the bridge, we and our experiences are the bridges. The witnesses were the bridge, they manifested the spiritual experiences that they experienced. The gold plates are a spiritual object as far as I am concerned, they existed in the spiritual experiences of those who beheld them. To say they never existed at all tends to hit me as a denial of personal experience. I believe the witnesses were sincere in expressing their personal experience. If you had a camera and photographed a witness as the hefted the plates what would you capture? I’m not sure, but it doesn’t matter. If the plates were to exist as a physical historical relic, as concrete as the seer stone, we would be living in a different world. I don’t need to speculate what life on a different planet might be like because I don’t live there. I do accept the gold plates as a spiritual reality and tied to the origination of the BoM manuscript. The book is a meaningful spiritual text to me. It came to be how it came to be, and we are told “through the gift and power of God.” That does not necessarily imply any concrete object other than what remains with us. This is the reality of my religious life. I just don’t have a need to build the bridge, I can transmute meaning that enhances my life without the worry that anything from my spiritual reality may be “proven false.” Spiritual things lie in a different realm from physical proof.

But that’s me, we all come to our own truth.

Do we really want to see the physical objects behind the scriptures?

This question is also part of my thoughts. Physical interpretations will often look different from spiritual. Thank you.

AP,

Did the plates exist? If so, where they really gold? These are matters of subjective interpretation.

So, let’s focus on what the witnesses said, rather than “how many people actually and truly saw the gold plates”, which is something we cannot know.

The “spiritual eyes” issue that you bring up is that MH did seem to say that with some regularity. But it’s hard to know what he was getting at. He seemed to have a hard time expressing what he really meant, IMO, evidenced by the varied interpretation by the listeners. My study of this makes me think he was trying to express that it was a god-given manifestation, specifically to give the experience more weight. However, his comments were frequently used to dismiss his witness, which I’m certain was the opposite of what he intended.

There were twelve people who claimed to see the plates directly. I always like to keep in mind when I think of these folks that they were a lot younger than our mental picture of them. When the BofM manuscripts went to press, JS and OC were both 23 years of age. DW was 24. MH was older, but still just 46, not the white-haired gentleman we think of. Six of the Eight Witnesses were in their 20’s. The twelve people who made these claims were as follows:

JS – “I looked [into the stone box], and there indeed did I behold the plates, the Urim and Thummim, and the breastplate, as stated by the messenger.” – PofGP

OC – “It was a clear, open beautiful day, far from any inhabitants, in a remote field, at the time we saw the record, of which it has been spoken, brought and laid before us, by an angel, arrayed in glorious light, [descended] out of the midst of heaven. Now if this is human juggling—judge ye.” – letter to Cornelius Blatchly, 1829.

MH – “The Prophet Joseph Smith, and Oliver Cowdery and David Whitmer and myself, went into a little grove to pray to obtain a promise that we should behold it with our natural eyes, that we could testify of it to the world.” – 1875 interview with Ole Jensen. Jensen’s manuscript used the phrase “behold it with our eyes”, then crossed out “eyes” and continued to write out “natural eyes”.

DW – “I was not under any hallucination . . . . I saw with these eyes.” – Palmyra Reflector, 1831.

8W (Christian, Jacob, Peter and John Whitmer, Hiram Page, JSsr, HS, and Samuel H Smith): “And this we bear record with words of soberness, that the said Smith has shown unto us, for we have seen and hefted, and know of a surety that the said Smith has got the plates of which we have spoken.”

Those are the best sources I know. There are other sources: some stating that MH used the term ‘vision’ or ‘spiritual’, etc, others that MH/DW expressed a reality of what they saw. Yet, all these other cases are somewhat questionable: things like “I once heard MH/DW say something”, or “so-and-so told me that MH said…” I’m not saying that any one of them is inaccurate, there’s just a lot of second-hand info and a dearth of statements directly attributed to the witnesses themselves outside of what is published with the BofM.

I debated on whether or not to post this because of the implications and because the subject matter is traditionally used to tear down belief rather than build belief but bear with me, it’s a real story.

I remember seeing Santa’s sleigh fly by in the night sky when I was a kid. Serious.

Now that you’ve all stopped laughing… I still remember details like the room I was in, the window I looked through, the time of day, seeing the silhouette against the night sky, and running and telling my parents. I can only imagine what they must have thought. The memory is still fairly vivid despite all the time that has passed. While I can’t explain the experience I can say that it left a big impression on my young mind. These days all my adult mind can come up with is, “yep I remember thinking that.”

I had another (even stranger) experience later in life but I chalked that one up to being awake for almost two straight days. Once you’re sleep deprived all bets are off.

Still I question what, if anything, I saw that day. Who’s to say it wasn’t real? Ok, I am but a guy can dream, right?